Watch out if you’re not the guy

Published: Thursday, February 14, 2013 at 6:11 p.m.

Last Modified: Thursday, February 14, 2013 at 6:11 p.m.

If you think you’re up on current events, please tell me the connection that links David Perdue, Margie Carranza and Emma Hernandez.

Time’s up. All three were shot at by California police officers in the midst of a manhunt focused on ex-Los Angeles police officer Chris Dorner.

Eventually, the story goes, Dorner was tracked down at a cabin in the woods and died in the resulting fire. So far, the cops have denied that the fire was started on purpose.

Back to the other three. Perdue was stopped by the police, checked out and told to go on his way.

He is, after all, a thin white guy, not the hefty black man Dorner was.

Moments later, he was sideswiped by a police cruiser, and his truck was riddled with bullets.

He suffered a concussion and a shoulder injury but was not struck by any of the bullets fired into his truck by the zealous police officers.

Margie Carranza and her mother, Emma Hernandez, had the misfortune of delivering newspapers as the cops were searching for Dorner.

They, too, are not large black men.

But that didn’t keep another team of officers from shooting up their pickup truck, hoping to kill Dorner — who was nowhere near the two women.

They, too, escaped with their lives, no thanks to the many rounds of ammo fired into their truck.

Apparently, the police out in California make up in persistence what they lack in marksmanship or judiciousness.

Unwilling or unable to identify their human targets, they were willing to just shoot at people who happened to be in pickups that did or did not match the description of Dorner’s truck.

So when they surrounded the cabin in the woods and gunfire erupted, there wasn’t much reason to suspect they had the right guy. But they say they did.

The medical folks as of Thursday were still performing genetic testing on the body recovered from the cabin to find out if this police shooting victim happens to be the person the cops were actually trying to kill.

If it is — and the police seem pretty sure — the manhunt will have come to the violent end both sides seemed to crave.

All of this brings up a few questions:

Who is teaching these guys how to shoot?

I might be suffering from inflated expectations here, but if you put a certain number of bullets into a pickup, you should probably hit someone, right?

I’m not saying that the man or the women who were just innocent passersby should have been shot, but if the cops were trying to kill them, they didn’t even come close.

Does a cop killer warrant swifter justice than other suspects?

The answer to this is a resounding yes.

I’m not endorsing this view, but it is more than clear from watching the unfolding manhunt that people who are suspected of killing police officers get more attention than those who kill your average Joe.

That’s fair.

People who kill cops are likely to kill anyone.

But wouldn’t it be nice for the residents of Los Angeles to expect their own lives to elicit a similar response from their protectors in blue?

Do you guys even try to get it right?

With a growing list of innocent victims of police shootings, I suppose all of Southern California is fortunate that the Dorner manhunt has finally ended. There is no telling how many more people would be shot at or if more might actually be hit by police bullets had the manhunt continued.

While it is tempting to think that Dorner was cornered and killed because of the careful, dedicated police work that is the hallmark of law-enforcement professionals, everything else we know about the case demands we look elsewhere for an explanation.

Instead, let’s just give thanks that the body count isn’t any higher and that the California cops can’t hit where they’re aiming.

Editorial Page Editor Michael Gorman can be reached at 448-7612 or by e-mail at mike.gorman@dailycomet.com.

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